Chad Dingle, 20, a West Linn High School graduate, was at work Tuesday afternoon at the J.C. Penney's at Clackamas Town Center. He works in the Levi's department, just to the right of the store's front door. Suddenly, according to his mother, Joan Callander Dingle of West Linn, a former neighborhood correspondent for The Oregonian, "people were running through yelling that there was a shooter."

Dingle moved away from the door, called store security and asked, "Did you know there's a shooter in the mall?"

No, said the person on the other end. Dingle was told, "Run to the door, help them get that door closed." He did so. Moments later, the store manager arrived and locked the door.

Dingle ran into a break room with fellow employees and a few customers. Then he called his mother, who was at the grocery store.

"I thought it was a done deal," she said. "I didn't realize the shooter was still at large."

"He said, 'Go home, Mom, and turn on the TV." ... Call me."

After Callander Dingle got home, she tried to reach her son and couldn't get through. Then she tried to text him. That didn't work either. Then it dawned on her that the shooters -- at the time, it was thought there was more than one -- were still walking around the mall and that people were hiding.

"I thought, 'Oh my God, what if it's my call that alerts them where these people are?' So I stopped."

As she flipped between news channels, she heard that the shooter had moved to the mall's food court. Then she remembered that her son's fiancee, Jessica Urban, works at Jamba Juice in the food court.

Callander Dingle got on her email, then logged onto Facebook. There was a post from Urban saying that she was sick and hadn't gone to work. Callander Dingle breathed a sigh of relief: "I don't have to worry about whether Chad's going to do something to get to her."

Then she got a text from her son saying he was OK.

Only then did she learn that her son had been at the store's front door. "That's when I really started shaking -- the shooter could have gone right instead of left."

Dingle ended up staying in the break room for up to three hours, his mother estimated. Eventually, police came by and escorted everyone out. He got home about 6 o'clock, two and a half hours after the shooting began.

"I was really proud of him," she said.

"My heart is with every single person that was impacted -- those that were shot, the shooter's family, they've gotta just be in hell," she added. "This isn't going to be something that's going to leave anybody that was there."

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